How to Build Guest Post Links (The Right Way) for SEO Dominance

This article was originally published as a part of the mddigitalgraphicdesigns Inner Circle.

It’s the private newsletter for our clients, partners, and friends, where we share one super actionable SEO tip that has worked well for us, every week.

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Our Go-To Link Building Strategy

The number one link building strategy we use for Smash Digital, our portfolio of businesses, our investments, and of course, our clients – is guest posting.

But there’s a major flaw with the way most people are taught how to do it.

Today, we’re going to show you how to do it right.

Time to learn: 5-10 minutes

Impact (1-10): 10

Tools required: None

Tools suggested: ahrefs

Now, let’s get to it…

What’s Wrong With Guest Posting Tutorials?

If you’ve ever tried to do guest posting on your own, you’ve probably seen these tutorials already.

They go something along the lines of:

1. List down some keywords related to your industry
2. Combine them with search parameters such as:
   1. “Write for us”
   2. “Submit a guest post”
   3. “Guest post guidelines”
   4. Etc
3. Pull all the results together
4. Add SEO metrics (domain rating, number of links, etc)
5. Find the owners email or the guest posting page
6. Start pitching

While this is an acceptable approach, it’s got two glaring issues with it.

First of all, this is the way every newbie SEO has been taught to do guest posts. In fact, they probably all send the same email templates as well.

Not only that, spammers have been automating these queries for close to a decade now which means…

This is the best way to find guest posts… that have been spammed to death and have no quality standards.

There, I said it.

Sure, you can find some acceptable sites using this way and get some results.

But there’s a better way.

How We Find High-Quality Guest Post Opportunities

If you’ve read any of our other actionable SEO tips, you can already guess which tool we’re going to use to make this happen.

Let’s open up Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and we’re effectively going to use the same approach as the previously mentioned guides do.

You’ll want to type in phrases related to your industry.

I’m going to use email marketing as an example, so I might type in something like “email subject line”.

That presents us with every single article Ahrefs has ever crawled related to email subject lines, which is about 63,000 pages.

Since we’re going to be guest posting on websites, not pages, we’ll want to add some filters:

• Show one page per domain
• Only show English results
• Pages that are live
• Minimum domain rating of 30

This narrows it down “just” to around 10,000 guest posting opportunities for us.

You’re probably wondering why we’re assuming these websites accept guest posts in the first place?

The truth is that we never do but all it takes to find out is to send them an email. Any type of outreach-based link building is generally a numbers game, but a good pitch goes a long way (more on that shortly).

While this means it might take a few extra emails until someone accepts your pitch, these sites are also going to be much higher quality.

P.S. You can technically apply the exact same strategy without Ahrefs but it’ll be a lot of work.

Additional Guest Posting Tips

Different strokes for different folks…

If you already have a super authoritative website (let’s say DR65+) with tons of links, you’ll want to focus your efforts on getting higher authority links.

This means you’ll also have to create much higher quality guest articles and put more effort into your outreach emails. Higher authority sites tend to have higher standards and can be harder to reach.

For those of you with a newer website or simply a weak backlink profile, even an “average” link can go a long way in improving your results.

In this case, you might want to set an additional domain rating filter – to only show sites between say DR25 and DR50. They will be less strict with the content required and easier to reach. You’ll be able to attract a whole lot more links as you build up your authority.

That’s all from me for this week.

Next week, I’m going to show you how to write the perfect guest post pitch.

Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll see you next week with yet another actionable SEO strategy.